Over the last several years I have watched the rise of an important new intellect on the American scene. Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, has demonstrated time and again the extraordinary ability to reexamine settled issues and show that the accepted conclusion was incorrect.

One of his early achievements was to dispose of the myth of immigrant crime by demonstrating that “Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age and gender.” You can imagine the uproar, but Unz won the debate.

Unz provoked and prevailed in another controversy when he concluded that Mexican-Americans have approximately the same innate intelligence as whites, with their lower IQs being due to transitory socio-economic deprivation.

He next surprised by showing the connection between the declining real value of the minimum wage (about one-third less than in the 1960s) and immigration. Americans cannot survive on one-third less minimum income than four decades ago, and the unfilled jobs are taken by Hispanics who live many to the room. A higher minimum wage, Unz pointed out, would cure the illegal immigration problem as American citizens would fill the jobs.

I wrote about some of Unz’s remarkable findings. One of my favorites is his comparison of the responsiveness of the Chinese and US governments to their publics. I found his conclusion convincing that the authoritarian one-party Chinese government was more responsive to the Chinese people than democratic two-party Washington is to the American people.

The person is rare who can take on such controversial issues in such a professional way that he wins the admiration even of his critics. In my opinion, Ron Unz is a national resource. He has established online libraries of important periodicals and magazines from the pre-Internet era, information that otherwise essentially would be lost. I have not met him, but he donates to this site and is an independent thinker free of The Matrix.

“The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

“True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.

“The result was what my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom rightly called the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” American forces suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and injuries, while our country took a huge step toward national bankruptcy [and a police state]. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per American household, mostly still unpaid. Meanwhile, economist Edward Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010 from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a leading cause.

“But no one involved in the debacle ultimately suffered any serious consequences, and most of the same prominent politicians and highly paid media figures who were responsible remain just as prominent and highly paid today. For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have similarly forgotten. Recent polls show that only half the public today believes that the Iraq War was a mistake.”

Unz covers a number of cases of criminality, treason, and coverups at high levels of government and points out that “these dramatic, well-documented accounts have been ignored by our national media.” One reason for “this wall of uninterest” is that both parties are complicit and thus equally eager to bury the facts.

Comment by crazy eh on 1st June 2013ultimately we are all becoming indentured slaves, for corpratist governments. True capitalism as true communisium can never truly exist. As we have seen, in both cases, war becomes the great equalizer. Economies collapse, as indeed the western economies will, no matter how long central banks and trade organizations, fiddle with the monetary system. We are hopelessly locked into a fossil fuel economy and unless that yoke is broken, we have 2 maybe 3 generations before true anarchy sets in. Again war will become the great equalizer. All economies and wars are the result of human initiative or dispute. There are only two lifeforms on the planet that will destroy their own habitats to their own destruction. One is bacteria, the other is man. Intelligent, are'nt we?

Help on way for beleagered resource companies

Comment by david dickinson on 22nd May 2013Fortunately for the oil and gas and mining sectors, which are horribly cash-strapped, the Northern Development Initiative Trust provides funding for education programs to train workers to become drillers etc., thus diversifying our northern economy. It's a good thing government is providing the funds for resource based training, because the oil & gas and mining companies would never be able to afford such training as they are all on the verge of bankruptcy. True, we might have to reduce health care and education to provide this training, but by the year 2030, out of the goodness of their hearts, the resource sector will build and staff all the hospitals and schools we need. (The Christy Clark promise.)

Dumbed down public

Comment by Terry on 17th May 2013Government stealing money and using it for private companies use . We don't have to leave Canada to find corruption . Just imagine for a second that the government were to use 16 million of our dollars to promote the consumption of pizza and pop . Telling us the benefits of of shipping it all over the world . That is what they are now doing with our hard earned money . Using our money to promote oil pipelines and Alberta oil for the benefit of oil and pipeline companies . Those poor companies don't have enough money to promote their own products . They have to use our elected politicians and our money . Harper and Oliver are nothing but pimps for big oil using our money to screw us all . They must just laugh at all of us .